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Inside the spore, Lavon's body seemed to be rapidly shed-
ding its skin, in long strips and patches. Gradually, his curi-
ous shrunkenness disappeared. His withered arms and legs and sunken abdomen
filled out again.
The days went by while Shar watched. Finally he could discern no more changes,
and, on a hunch, had the spore taken up to the topmost battlements of the
tower, into the di-
rect daylight.
An hour later, Lavon moved in his amber prison.
He uncurled and stretched, turned blank eyes up toward the light. His
expression was that of a man who had not yet awakened from a ferocious
nightmare. His whole body shone with a strange pink newness.
Shar knocked gently on the walls of the spore. Lavon turned his blind face
toward the sound, life coming into his eyes. He smiled tentatively and braced
his hands and feet against the inner wall of the shell.
The whole sphere fell abruptly to pieces with a sharp crack-
ling. The amnionic fluid dissipated around him and Shar, carrying away with
it the suggestive odor of a bitter struggle against death.
Lavon stood among the shards and looked at Shar silently.
At last he said:
"SharI've been above the sky."
"I know," Shar said gently.
Again Lavon was silent. Shar said, "Don't be humble, Lavon. You've done an
epoch-making thing. It nearly cost you your life. You must tell me the restall
of it."
"The rest?"
"You taught me a lot while you slept. Or are you still op-
posed to 'useless' knowledge?"
Lavon could say nothing. He no longer could tell what he knew from what he
wanted to know. He had only one ques-
tion left, but he could not utter it. He could only look dumb-
ly into Shar's delicate face.
"You have answered me," Shar said, even more gently than before. "Come, my
friend; join me at my table. We will plan our journey to the stars."
There were five of them around Shar's big table: Shar him-
self, Lavon, and the three assistants assigned by custom to the Shars from the
families Than, Tanol and Stravol. The duties of these three menor, sometimes,
womenunder many previous Shars had been simple and onerous: to put into effect
in the field the genetic changes in the food crops which the Shar himself had
worked out in little, in laboratory tanks and flats. Under other Shars more
interested in metal-
working or in chemistry, they had been-smudged mendig-
gers, rock-splitters, fashioners and cleaners of apparatus.
Under Shar XVI, however, the three assistants had been more envied than usual
among the rest of Lavon's people, for they seemed to do very little work of
any kind. They spent long hours of every day talking with Shar in his
chambers, poring over records, making miniscule scratch-marks on slate,
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
or just looking intently at simple things about which there was no obvious
mystery. Sometimes they actually worked with
Shar in his laboratory, but mostly they just sat.
Shar XVI had, as a matter of fact, discovered certain rudi-
mentary rules of inquiry which, as he explained it to Lavon, he had recognized
as tools of enormous power. He had become more interested in passing these on
to future workers than in the seductions of any specific experiment, the
journey to the stars perhaps excepted. The Than, Tanol and Stravol of his
generation were having scientific method pounded into their heads, a procedure
they maintained was sometimes more painful than heaving a thousand rocks.
That they were the first of Lavon's people to be taxed with the problem of
constructing a spaceship was, therefore, in-
evitable. The results lay on the table: three models, made of diatom-glass,
strands of algae, flexible bits of cellulose, flakes of stonewort, slivers of
wood, and organic glues collected from the secretions of a score of different
plants and animals.
Lavon picked up the nearest one, a fragile spherical con-
struction inside which little beads of dark-brown lavaac-
tually bricks of rotifer-spittle painfully chipped free from the wall of an
unused castlemoved freely back and forth in a kind of ball-bearing race. "Now
whose is this one?" he said, turning the sphere curiously to and fro.
"That's mine," Tanol said. "Frankly, I don't think it comes anywhere near
meeting all the requirements. It's just the only design I could arrive at that
I think we could build with the materials and knowledge we have to hand now."
"But how does it work?"
"Hand it here a moment, Lavon. This bladder you see in-
side at the center, with the hollow spirogyra straws leading out from it to
the skin of the ship, is a buoyancy tank. The idea is that we trap ourselves a
big gas-bubble as it rises from the Bottom and install it in the tank.
Probably we'll have to do that piecemeal. Then the ship rises to the sky on
the buoy-
ancy of the bubble. The little paddles, here along these two bands on the
outside, rotate when the crewtfiat's these bricks you hear shaking around
insidewalks a treadmill that runs around the inside of the hull; they paddle
us over to the edge of the sky. I stole that trick from the way Didin gets
about. Then we pull the paddles inthey fold over into slots, like thisand,
still by weight-transfer from the inside, we roll ourselves up the slope until
we're out in space. When we hit another world and enter the water again, we
let the gas out of the tank gradually through the exhaust tubes represented by
these straws, and sink down to a landing at a controlled rate."
"Very ingenious," Shar said thoughtfully. "But I can fore-
see some difficulties. For one thing, the design lacks stability."
"Yes, it does," Tanol agreed. "And keeping it in motion is going to require a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
